DON BIANCHI : Our first speaker will address the topic "A Challenge to 

 the Media.. Reporting the Real Issues." This gentleman was the dean of 

 the Forestry School at the University of Montana at Missoula prior to 1977 

 when he came to work for the Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife and 

 Parks as the director. He has been serving in that capacity for the last 

 three plus years. With that, I would like to give you Dr. Robert F. 

 Wambach. 



"Montana can't survive if those of us who are conservationists are 

 splintered, if we are divisive, if we are feuding among ourselves. If we 

 don't form a coalition among all the groups that have a common inter- 

 est in rural America... we are going to lose." 



WAMBACH : 1 didn't prepare a speech for this morning and so I am just 

 going to talk to you from my heart and tell you what I think about the 

 natural resource issues and the challege that we are all facing. I am 

 assuming that everybody in this room first of all is interested in natural 

 resources and the protection and preservation of those resources. And I 

 am also going to assume, and I think that this is probably correct, that 

 most of you are communicators--either from the agency side or from the 

 media side. What I want to do is talk to you as somebody who has been 

 intimately involved for 25 years in the promotion of the conservation 

 movement and the protection and enhancement of our natural resources. 

 As I am sure everybody in this room knows, I recently resigned from a 

 position where I had some influence over the course of events. 



Let me start with a couple of little stories. Now these are true- 

 to-life stories and the purpose of these stories is to tell where my head is 

 and what 1 am trying to accomplish. 



It may be two years, it may be two-and-a-half years ago, I can't 

 remember, but I was director of the Department of Fish and Game at that 

 time--now Fish, Wildlife and Parks. I was attending a regional meeting in 

 Denver with colleagues of mine from other western states. The primary 

 issue at that time was the Alaska land decision, revolving around the lands 

 in Alaska that the federal establishment is trying to divvy up among the 

 the refuges, parks and Forest Service and trying to decide whether 

 hunting should be allowed or not. Another two or three issues we dealt 

 with at that time included a Supreme Court issue Montana was dealing with 



